Do Reports on Crop Circles Even Belong in a UFO Magazine?

by Drs. Bob and Zohara Hieronimus

The answer is yes if you acknowledge that UFO readers are curious and open-minded people interested in any true planetary mystery. Although there is no apparent link between the two phenomena, much like the UFOs that are explored in this magazine, crop formations are a true Earth mystery. Many have assumed a UFO connection, especially in the 1980s before crop “circles” grew into elaborate formations. Back then, some people were even calling them landing sites for UFOs. Now that the geometric and mathematically elaborate patterns consist of more than just circular shapes, many still assume a UFO connection, if only because they appear so darned non-human. Famed Harvard psychiatrist and abduction researcher, Dr. John Mack, became entranced with crop circles shortly before his death in 2004, calling them “the most dramatic and most extraordinary crossover from the other dimension in the history of the human race.”

Mack is one of many fascinating people featured in Suzanne Taylor’s film, What On Earth? Inside the Crop Circle Mystery, produced by Mighty Companions (http://theconversation.org). Taylor, long an appreciator of the phenomenon, engages with many “croppies” — scientists, philosophers, geometers, educators, and artists from all over the world — who gather in England every summer, where the most and the best formations appear. Like the UFO community, they are pooling their experience and background to come up with theories based on the patterns they have identified. What On Earth? won the EBE award for Best Feature Documentary at the UFO Congress Film Festival, where Patty Greer’s crop circle film, The Wake Up Call, won that award in 2010, and Crop Circles: Quest for Truth, for which Suzanne was Executive Producer, won the Audience Award in 2003. It’s obvious that the elegant, mysterious beauty of this anomaly has captivated the UFO audience. Taylor says, “Fortuitously, the UFO people think of crop circles as part of their world. I’m very happy to get their award, which, by the way, looks like an Oscar, only it’s an alien with a little camera on his shoulder. He’s very cute.”

On 21st Century Radio, with Dr. Bob Hieronimus, Suzanne Taylor explained that as a long-time student of consciousness and the human potential, she was attracted early on to the crop circle mystery. Back in the 1980s, she “zeroed in on them as a possible transformative agent,” and began producing programs about them in Los Angeles. She made her first trip to England in 1993, and the more she learned the more she was convinced that “the circles present an opportunity for a radical shift of our worldview.” We all worry that Earth is in danger of destruction at the hands of humans, Taylor says. “If we knew we were being visited, we would be one humanity in relation to ‘the other,’ and, as someone in the film says, ‘That could be what saves this civilization.’”

“Look, nothing’s working,” elaborated Taylor on 21st Century Radio. “We can’t make things work because we’ have the wrong idea. We’ve got a system where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and war is perfectly acceptable. You can’t run a world this way. It doesn’t hold together. It’s a dangerous time and we need a shift in our fundamental worldview about who we are and what we’re doing here. Of course, if we blow up half the world, that would change things. Horrible disasters can change the fundamentals. But, I like to think something peaceful could, too. I mean, by accepting the fact that we’re not alone and the ramifications of that, just think how that would ripple out and get us to revise our perspectives on who we are and what we’re doing here.”

There has been a recent groundswell of highly credible sources from the government and the military “going public” about UFO experiences, and several countries recently have released their classified UFO files. Average Americans, who never thought twice about the UFO phenomenon beyond it being a joke and a hoax, are experiencing a dawning realization that maybe we are being visited from elsewhere. “Governments, armies, and the church don’t want that out, because it changes the world; it changes humanity,” says Janet Ossebaard, a researcher from the Netherlands who is featured in Taylor’s film.

In the early 1990s, when the crop circles began developing into elaborate, geometric formations, theories shifted from them being landing sites for UFOs or weather phenomena, to the possibility that they are a form of communication. One of the most popular questions for the croppies, reports Taylor, is whether anyone has been able to “crack the code,” as if you could string all the formations together and they would solve a puzzle. While many individual formations are loaded with information expressed in symbols and codes from many disciplines — astronomy, biology, chemistry, and other systems of knowledge — Taylor tells us that the geometers are the ones making the most exciting connections. The circlemakers are delivering “a virtual curriculum in geometry and number,” she says, with the mathematical information encoded in them. Taylor noted that “they started with circular elements only, and then went into triangles, and then squares, and then 5-sided, 6-sided, 7-sided, 8-sided shapes. They just kept adding more facets to the patterns, and the free-form designs that also appear are becoming more and more complex.”

The sophistication of the geometric patterns is one of the hints to determine that any particular formation is not a human-made hoax. However, the hoaxers have gotten better, and now they also create some splendidly complex formations necessitating other tests to rule out human hoaxes. The most definitive tests are done in the laboratory on the crop and soil samples using strict scientific protocols. There are physical changes to the crops and the soil in the mysterious circles that do not appear in formations made by humans flattening the crops with boards, and the results of these experiments have been published in peer-reviewed science journals.

Before samples can be sent to a lab, however, while inside the new formations, croppies are on the lookout for things they can see, like markings or damage made by boards and feet. They are also looking for things they can’t see, like the anomalous phenomena that often occur inside a mysteriously delivered crop formation. Similar to the phenomena reported during close encounters with a UFO and within locations purported to be haunted, inside crop circles investigators will often report that batteries will drain, mobile phones won’t work, and magnetometers and voltage meters go haywire. “But if you step right outside the circle,” says Taylor, “phones will work again. Step back inside the circle, and they won’t. If any of that happens,” she claims, “you can pretty well know you’re in a genuinely mysterious glyph.”

Those practicing the ancient art of dowsing are richly rewarded in the formations. “If a dowser closes his eyes in a formation,” says Taylor, “he can tell you where the pattern changes, and a lot about the construction. One of our dowsers was blindfolded 90 miles away from a formation, and just using his dowsing rods he told the driver where to make turns to get to that crop circle.”

And what are we to make of the predominance of these formations appearing near the ancient, sacred sites that proliferate in southern England (Stonehenge being only the best known)? Crop formations have been recorded in forty other countries, as well, and Taylor says that all over the world they tend to land near sites with spiritual histories, like Indian burial grounds in the United States. Taylor calls this “picking the bull’s eye spot,” quoting one of the croppies in her film, theorizing that the circlemakers are “calling us back to a time when we were more connected to the earth, when we were more whole beings, when we weren’t split off from the sacred and weren’t worshipping the material.” She believes that the formations are appearing in crops, the basis of our sustenance, as a means of “calling us to something more elemental than the life we are living now.”

As the world moves toward a re-uniting of science and spirit, and our perspective becomes more holistic, it is the hope of Taylor and other optimistic croppies that these incredible formations will pull humanity into conversation focused on what to do in relation to them. It certainly seems that the circles are being made with the intent of being seen and with the purpose of accomplishing something. They even seem to respond to human interest, delivering more formations when and where people gather to study them. As Taylor concludes, on her website, “It could be that the contact established via the circles will create a new beginning for humanity – the start of an era when awe and wonder will supplant the dangerous oppositional behaviors prevalent today.”

“My life has been spent exploring extraordinary human functioning, and how individuals and small groups can, and have, affected social change. I’ve done this both as an experimentalist in parapsychology, and by being privileged to have been a part of several major social transformations: civil rights in the 1960s, the transformation of the military from an elitist conscription organization to an all-voluntary meritocracy in the 70s, and citizen diplomacy between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 80s and 90s. Both the experiences and the research have convinced me that all life is inter-connected and interdependent.”

A few days ago, Stephan posted my NY Times movie review on SchwartzReport. He led off with these remarks, which I like very much:

“What on Earth?” Probes Mysteries of Crop Circles

This is a new documentary by SR reader, Suzanne Taylor, who has been a friend for many years. I have seen the documentary, and think this is a very good assessment. As the reviewer notes, the images of the “circles” are stunning. And Suzanne is very amiable. She doesn’t condescend or make fun. So you get to hear from these people what they really believe, which is interesting. Skepticism gets boring. Agreement is not required, only a respect for sincerity.

I know some of you will write me and ask me what I believe about this. Here it is: I made a documentary on the circles myself in the 1980s, and came away from it feeling that while some were hoaxes, others could not be explained away so easily. Just writing this brings back the memory of talking with a British army officer who had been detailed to examine them. All night he and his crew stood on a hill looking out into the dark, seeing a field beneath them in the green glow of night goggles. They had all kind of instrumentation. As the day broke the officer said to me, “I turned around to take a leak, and there before me, in the other direction was a large and complex circle. I do not believe any method I know could have accomplished that without being detected.”

That and the interview with a young Mormon couple who had a circle appear in their field, just before harvest, which they did not appreciate at all. This is the other one that stands out in my memory. The young couple could not have been straighter. They had that integrity about being truthful that anyone who has Mormon farm friends would instantly recognize. I knew they were telling me what they had experienced.

If pressed to construct a scenario which would cover the observed phenomenon I would say this: Suppose at some future date some kind of retrocausal technology develops. You’re in a laboratory in the U.K. and you want to test the technology in some objectively verifiable manner but you have to be careful not to set some change in the past that could alter the future. Well, how about going back and leaving a design, randomly selected for you before you exercised this technology in the crop of a farm field. It would be sure to get recorded so, in the future, your present, you could go to newspapers or video of the era and see whether your design had been reported. Since the appearances were inexplicable, they would generate only short term local interest, and likely be dismissed as curiosities or fakes. Thus they would confirm, while producing few ripples.

I got to the wondrous Charles Lawrence thanks to Elissa Zimmerman. A wondrous being herself, Elissa lives in my neck of the woods, and recently became a friend when I looked into who had bought ten DVDs!

Here are some quotes that touch my heart from an interview with Charles that is introduced this way:

Charles Lawrence, world traveler, former psychologist and businessman whose life took a new course when he experienced a paranormal event. He was adopted and baptized by the Hopi Indians some 20 years ago. The spokesman of the native thought came to Finland for the celebration of the Finnish association “Four Winds”.

“I am leading people out of the confines of domestication into more authentic lives.”

“I am far more focused on being spirited, not spiritual. Radical aliveness is not vacuous spirituality.”

“There are the directions: the wind, the air, the earth, the fire, the water. They are in divine, dynamic participation. Every indigenous culture has this, only this nightmare came along called the western way and disrupted their whole understanding of unity, cohesion and energy all working together.”

“To me there is a difference between so-called “healing” and “creating”, they are contrasting. I worked for many years as a co-healer. I now prefer to stimulate creativity in people. You may call it healing but to me it is helping to inspire, guide that person to go on and live their life in a new way. The Navajo don’t call it healing, because there is nothing to heal. They just put that person back into the original alignment where everything is always positive and healthy.”

“We come to this world, we touch many lives, and one of the big problems, which either Jesus or his followers messed up, is not about treating your neighbour, but to treat yourself the way you want to be treated.”

TheConversation.org had its start when 9/11 dictated that we were in a new world.

At this threshold moment for humanity, when we must choose wisely to avoid what could be our annihilation, this site is dedicated to tracking the emerging intelligence that we need for our very survival, and to conversation in which that intelligence can be forged.

Let those who see beyond the idea of force imposing world order, to where we look to heal the causes of despair, meet here.

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